Menu
The History of Moviegoing, Exhibition, and Reception—or HoMER—Project was founded by an international group of cinema scholars in June 2004.
It aims to promote understanding of the complex, international phenomena of film going, exhibition, and reception through several means:
Talitha Ferraz is a Brazilian professor in cinema and media studies at the Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM) and the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Cinema e Audiovisual of the Universidade Federal Fluminense (PPGCine-UFF). She holds a PhD in communication and culture from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (ECO-UFRJ), with a doctoral internship at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FCSH-Nova), Portugal. Dr. Ferraz carried out postdoctoral research at the Centre for Cinema and Media Studies (CIMS) at Ghent University, Belgium. In Brazil, she is coordinator of the research groups Modos de Ver (ESPM-PPGCine-UFF/ CNPq) and Coordenação Interdisciplinar de Estudos Contemporâneos da ECO-UFRJ (CIEC/ECO-UFRJ). Dr. Ferraz is also one of the coordinators of History of Moviegoing Exhibition and Reception – HoMER Network, and member of the following networks International Media & Nostalgia Network (IMNN) and Cinema City Cultures (CCC). Her research area is cinema history, with a focus on cinema exhibition and cinemagoing practices, as well as memory and nostalgia studies.
Matthew Rule-Jones (né Jones) is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Exeter. He is a specialist in film audiences, community cinema and film archives. He is the author of Cinema Memories: A People’s History of 1960s Cinemagoing (BFI, 2022) with Professor Melvyn Stokes (UCL) and Dr Emma Pett (University of York), and Science Fiction Cinema and 1950s Britain: Recontextualising Cultural Anxiety (Bloomsbury, 2019). His current research explores contemporary and historical community cinema practices in the UK. He is collaborating with Cinema for All (formerly the British Federation of Film Societies) on a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust-funded project to catalogue and open the archive of the Federation for the first time since its establishment in the 1940s. As non-commercial, volunteer-led film exhibition prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary in Britain, Dr Jones’ important work is shedding new light on this underexplored aspect of the history of film consumption in the UK and the vital role played by the Federation in this largely untold story.
